A Response To BroBible’s Defense of Cargo Shorts

Our bros over at BroBible are good bros. Honest bros. Hardworking bros who help spread the bro culture, which is of course the culture lived by all white males who don’t wear skinny jeans and cardigans, at least according to the skinny jeaned and cardigan wearing bloggers who often spend their time defining what exactly a bro is. Still, even though TFM and BroBible are best buds on the internet, it doesn’t mean we don’t have our differences. Case in point, this recent article published on BroBible titled, “In Defense of Cargo Shorts.”

Any good fraternity man, avid TFM reader, or reasonable human being knows that cargo shorts are an atrocity of legwear. They are a perversion of both the comfortable glory that is shorts and the ingenious invention that are pockets. I don’t know who first invented shorts, but I can pretty much guarantee that cargo shorts have the fourteenth Earl of Pocket rolling over in his grave.

I won’t sit here and act like I’ve never worn cargo shorts. I definitely owned a few pairs in my day. As the article I’m about to skewer points out, they used to be huge. Still, I was a kid, and like many other childhood fashions, such as overalls and cartoon clad diapers (plain diapers are still fine if you’re an astronaut or have a leaky colon), cargo shorts are best left in the past. The defender of cargo shorts, of course, disagrees.

I love my cargo shorts and I don’t care what you masses have to say. Cargo shorts were my jam growing up.

We have to stop right there. One of the author’s main justifications for wearing cargo shorts is actually an excellent argument for why nobody should wear cargo shorts. Pretty much everyone alive had terrible, laughable, please-God-don’t-pull-out-those-pictures fashion sense in junior high. Using the excuse, “I wore them in 7th grade, so OF COURSE they’re cool,” is a pretty terrible argument. You don’t see legions of girls who were in junior high around the turn of the century still walking around with crimped hair and chokers around their neck. There’s a reason. That reason is because none of that shit, like cargo shorts, looks good anymore (if it ever did), even if they do still give me flashback boners. HEY! It’s not gross to get aroused by 13-year-olds if they were 13 at the same time you were. Those erections are running on pure memory, not that any woman who sits near me in the back of a movie theater with fresh popcorn and a Cherry Coke wants to believe that. To me, that’s always what a hand job will smell like.

OOOOOHHHH BECAUSE FASHION SAYS IT’S OUT. Fashion. You mean the fuckers who skin bears and haphazardly wrap it around anorexic women before drenching them in cyan paint.

Yes. Let’s listen to those people.

We already know you don’t like fashion; you wear cargo shorts. Of course, there is a slight difference between moderately adhering to the fashion of the day and wearing assorted pieces of garbage woven together with unicorn hair harvested from the monstrosity that resulted in breeding a horse and a rhinoceros. The fashion industry really is cruel to animals.

I like my cargo shorts. I LOVE MY CARGO SHORTS.

Alright team six-inch inseam J. Crew shorts team. What happens when you need to smuggle a bowl and an eighth into a concert?

Team cargo shorts over here put his weed and his lighter and his bubbler into his cargo shorts cargo pocket and walked into the concert just fine. So fuck you. Logistically speaking.

Yeah yeah yeah, cargo shorts have a functional purpose. Sweet. Except I’m willing to bet that if you randomly went up to 100 people wearing cargo shorts throughout the course of any average day, and checked their cargo pockets, the majority would be empty. I can even speak from my own cargo short wearing days; the vast majority of the time those pockets went unused. So, basically, they’re useless most of the time, possibly all of the time if you don’t have any drugs to stash.

But let me counter and negate the above ridiculous hypothetical with an equally ridiculous one of my own. Hooray! You snuck drugs into a concert and now you’re doing them. Fun times are being had by all! Cargo shorts for the win! But wait, oh no! A cop has spotted you doing those drugs and chases after you and your friends. You’re slowed down by the baggy shorts, their extra canvas creating a cumbersome drag. Meanwhile, your friend in his slim, sleek Ralph Lauren shorts is a solid ten yards ahead of you and moving briskly, like a gazelle. He reaches a fence and hops it with ease. You decide to follow. You climb the fence and get to the top as the police officer reaches the base. You try to flip yourself over to the other side but, OH SHIT, you’ve ensnared one of your cargo pockets on the fence, fall, and are now hanging upside down as several very annoyed cops mace and taser you into submission. Then, depending on what and how much drugs you had in your cargo shorts (and your system), you end up going to jail and getting raped in the shower, every day, for five years, all because CARGO SHORTS.

But what pisses me off more about this mass hatred of cargo shorts is everyone’s stupid selective selection of a stupid fucking era.
“OHH MAD MEN WE LOVE THE MAD MEN WHY CAN’T WE ALL LOOK LIKE THE MAD MEN.”

That is you. Basing your identity off a TV show. But you can’t just adopt some element of culture and be like “This is the best!” Clothes come with the period. If you want everyone to wear chino shorts—or whatever they’re called—then you are alright with a time where political and social figures are assassinated on a regular basis. Remember that part of the 60s?

Claiming that wearing regular shorts makes you complacent with the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. is almost as much of a stretch as claiming cargo shorts are actually cool. Almost.

And come on. You really fucking care about shaming everyone wearing cargo shorts? Is this the cross to bear today? We have drones killing civilians in Yemen, famine in Somalia and bitches like Miley Cryus getting the dankiest of cocaine while all of us in suburbia are stuck paying $100 a bag for the god damn equivalent of Sweet N Blow.

These are the real issues of 2013.

The truth is, I’ve never once publically shamed someone for wearing cargo shorts, except for Allen…today.

And also this article. Other than that, I’m pretty apathetic to the shorts. Do I think they’re stupid? Yes. Do I think people look stupid in them? Absolutely. But the hate from myself and most others is pretty casual. I’m sure there are some high school frat stars out there giving swirlies to a kid who showed up to Fratty Friday in cargo shorts, but that’s not that big of a deal, because if karma exists, those try hards will get run over by a bus. The volume of cargo short mockery is born more out of the fact that they’re an easy, fun target than out of actual fervor.

Besides, I like to expend actual energy on hating truly abysmal fashion trends, like Sketchers Shape Ups. It takes massive restraint for me to not laugh loudly and aggressively in the face of every obese hillbilly I see waddling around the mall in those things.

Email this to a friend

“This year I am making pledges purchase a pair of cargo shorts. I will put bricks in the pockets. They will run in the cargo shorts, until they puke, every day for a month. Eventually they will be conditioned to feel nauseated every time they see a pair of cargo shorts. I call it Pavlov’s Pledges. TFM.

I have returned from doing some creeping on brobible, and holy shit that site is awful. i don’t think tfm is the greatest thing ever, but it makes tfm look like fucking cnn. while most of the content is similar (if not the same) it’s so watered down and filled with fluffer/drama. its like tmz for dudes

If the only logical reason you can come up with wearing cargo shorts is cause you need somewhere to put your weed, you’re a douche. If you’re out of high school and haven’t dropped pot altogether or at least moved on to bigger things you should find the tallest structure and do a swan dive.

“You’re slowed down by the baggy shorts, their extra canvas creating a cumbersome drag. Meanwhile, your friend in his slim, sleek Ralph Lauren shorts is a solid ten yards ahead of you and moving briskly, like a gazelle.” I lost it.

Come on Bacon!!! Its one thing to shame me and make my eyes water up due to allergies, not sadness, in the office, but cyberbullying me on the internet is crossing the line!!!!! I should be allowed to wear whatever I want without my coworkers and best bros ridiculing me over having extra pockets on my shorts!!!! :'(

You know what, maybe I’m the only one, but I’m not bothered by cargo shorts. I don’t wear them myself because I find them too heavy for the summer (if it isn’t too hot, I usually wear khakis, which are just as light), but really, it’s not a huge deal. They’re not any less “well dressed” than regular shorts because, well, you’re wearing shorts, so it’s not like you’re dressed well anyway. I feel like TFM started opposing cargo shorts just because GDIs wear them a lot, rather than having any real reason to care. As far as fashion goes, do your thing, but it just seems a little ridiculous for people to get so riled up about what other people wear.